Computational Synthesis and Creative Systems

About this series

Creativity has become the motto
of the modern world: everyone, every institution, and every company is exhorted
to create, to innovate, to think out of the box. This calls for the design of a
new class of technology, aimed at assisting humans in tasks that are deemed
creative.

Developing a machine capable of
synthesizing completely novel instances from a certain domain of interest is a
formidable challenge for computer science, with potentially ground-breaking
applications in fields such as biotechnology, design, and art. Creativity and
originality are major requirements, as is the ability to interact with humans
in a virtuous loop of recommendation and feedback. The problem calls for an
interdisciplinary perspective, combining fields such as machine learning,
artificial intelligence, engineering, design, and experimental psychology.
Related questions and challenges include the design of systems that effectively
explore large instance spaces; evaluating automatic generation systems, notably
in creative domains; designing systems that foster creativity in humans;
formalizing (aspects of) the notions of creativity and originality; designing
productive collaboration scenarios between humans and machines for creative
tasks; and understanding the dynamics of creative collective systems.

This book series intends to
publish monographs, textbooks and edited books with a strong technical content, and
focuses on approaches to computational synthesis that contribute not only to
specific problem areas, but more generally introduce new problems, new data, or
new well-defined challenges to computer science.